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Abstract

This essay argues that authors of English cookery texts in the 1650s, sixties, and seventies debated not only changing ideas and behaviors surrounding cooking, service, and feasting, but were also participating in a renegotiation and redefinition of other Restoration subjects such as public versus private spaces, domesticity, gender roles, and social class. This article considers five cookery texts published between the years 1656 and 1670: two works of royalist propaganda that adopted the form of the cookery book, The Queens Closet Opened (1656), attributed to Henrietta Maria, and The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth (1664), attributed to Elizabeth Cromwell; two works by professional male cooks, The Accomplisht Cook (1661) by Robert May, and The Whole Art of Cookery Dissected (1661) by William Rabisha; and The Queen-Like Closet (1670) by Hannah Wolley, England’s first professional female writer and cookery book author.

In these works, domestic spaces and activities – as well as the emerging form of the cookery text itself – become a sort of battleground on which men and women vied to construct and defend their authority as culinary experts and authors of printed cookery books. Simultaneously, these authors were actively engaged in a debate about English nationhood in the Restoration and what kinds of people could or should participate in the politics of good housekeeping.

Corps de l’article

Among the various prefatory materials that introduce master cook Robert May’s 1661
cookery book, The Accomplisht Cook is a two-page
description of a banqueting entertainment entitled “Triumphs
and Trophies in Cookery, to be used at Festival Times, as Twelfth Day, &c.”
Here, May instructs cooks on how to fashion a mock battle scene out of pasteboard, first
outlining the construction of a miniature ship of war, adorned with flags and streamers
and outfitted with pasteboard cannons filled with real gunpowder. Then, he says, whole
eggs are to be blown out and filled with sweet rosewater and placed about the ship. Cooks
should also construct a pasteboard stag filled with claret wine [1] with an arrow stuck into its side; this is to be placed in front of a
fortified pasteboard castle complete with gates and a drawbridge. He then recommends the
making of two pies, one filled with live frogs and the other with live birds, which are
placed atop the turrets of the castle.

Before feasting commences, “some of the Ladies may be perswaded to pluck the Arrow
out of the Stag, then will the Claret wine follow as blood running out of a wound,” May
writes. The cannons should then be fired from the castle and ship “as in a Battle,” while
the Ladies throw the rosewater eggs at one another to mask the smell of the gunpowder.
Finally, the lids are lifted off the pies:

…so that what with the flying Birds and skipping Frogs, the one above, the other
beneath, will cause much delight and pleasure to the whole company: at length the
candles are lighted, and a Banquet brought in, the musick sounds, and every one with
much delight and content rehearses their actions in the former passages. [2]

The above description betrays May’s deeply medieval sensibility toward aristocratic
dining, which favoured extravagant feasting and elaborate displays of conspicuous
consumption on noble tables such as the one detailed above. May, who had worked as a
master cook for élite families in England and abroad for almost four decades at the time
his book was published, finishes his description of such “triumphs and trophies” with a
rather nostalgic remembrance of a bygone era: “These were formerly the delights of the
Nobility,” he writes, “before good House-keeping had left England, and the Sword really acted that which was onely counterfeited in such
honest and laudable Exercises as these.” Here May suggests his own awareness that after
the trauma of civil war and regicide, such ostentatious displays had become outmoded by
the dawn of the Restoration.

As May’s nostalgia indicates, the Restoration was a time of changing culinary
attitudes. La Varenne’s Cuisinier François,
translated into English in 1653, sparked a gradual movement seen on England’s
élite tables away from the heavily spiced dishes of the Middle Ages toward a nouvelle cuisine that emphasized the distillation of food
into flavourful essences. Although this nouvelle
cuisine would not become the dominant style in Europe until the 17th century –
and, indeed, cookery books from this time still feature Italian, Spanish, and even Turkish
and Persian recipes – the French influence was growing in prestige during the Restoration.
More aristocratic households began employing French chefs. In 1674, Charles II appointed a
high-ranking French “pottagier” in his privy
kitchen. [3] Other culinary changes were underway as well.
Household accounts during and after the Commonwealth show a rise in fruit and vegetable
consumption, as well as a growing variety of the types of fruits and vegetables available.
Modes of service were also changing, as the presentation of dishes at courtly banquets was
increasingly divided into distinct courses. Also emergent was a marked division between
sweet and savoury flavours with sweeter dishes concluding the meal. After the Restoration,
the use of a fork became obligatory practice for carving and serving others at élite
tables.

Coinciding with these changing culinary patterns was a flurry of new printed cookery
texts that began to appear in England in the late 1650s. Richard Appelbaum writes, over
the course of the next several decades, “The book of the art of cookery enters into the
general literary life of European culture; it enters into European consciousness, or to
put it another way, into the European life of the mind.” [4]
I argue in this article that male and female authors of cookery texts in the 1650s,
sixties, and seventies debated not only changing ideas and behaviours surrounding cooking,
serving, and feasting, but were also participating in a renegotiation and redefinition of
other Restoration subjects such as public versus private spaces, domesticity, gender
roles, and social class. In these texts, domestic spaces and activities – as well as the
emerging form of the cookery text itself – become a sort of battleground on which men and
women vied to construct and defend their authority as culinary experts and authors of
printed cookery books. Simultaneously, the authors of cookery books were actively engaged
in a debate about English nationhood in the Restoration and what kinds of people could or
should participate in the politics of good housekeeping.

I consider in this article six cookery texts published between the years 1656 and
1670. With the exception of one book, The Court &
Kitchin of Elizabeth, all of the cookery texts discussed here were commercially
successful, were sold at a relatively low cost, went through numerous editions in print,
and circulated in significant numbers within the literate population. [5] I have divided the article into three analytical sections. The
first section looks at two printed works of royalist propaganda that adopted the form of
the cookery book. They are The Queens Closet Opened
(1656), attributed to Henrietta Maria,
and The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth (1664),
attributed to Elizabeth Cromwell. I show how these two texts, as male-authored works that
reveal information about the private lives of women to political ends, strain the limits
of the cookery book genre which contributes to their instability as texts. The second
section deals with Robert May’s aforementioned The
Accomplisht Cook, as well as another cookery book written by a male
professional cook, The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected
(1661) by William Rabisha. I demonstrate how both of these authors construct
their authority as professionals and cookery book authors through a masculinization of the
text and their insistence upon the indispensability of the male professional cook to the
nation’s wellbeing. In the third section I look at the writing of Hannah Wolley, England’s
first professional female writer and cookery book author. Wolley’s most popular book,
The Queen-Like Closet (1670), shows her ability to synthesize, both formally and
figuratively, a number of competing social dichotomies, as well as her ability to
universalize good housekeeping as a patriotic national project.

All of these texts participate in what Laura Knoppers calls a “politics of cookery”
in the 17th century. Together they “link participation in domestic practices with the
legitimacy and authority in the state.” [6] If, as these
texts suggest, good housekeeping and hospitality were seen as essential to England’s
strength as a nation, then who had authority over shaping and defining good domestic
practices was of vital national importance. While scholars have primarily looked at 17th
century cookery books either from the perspective of culinary history or as examples of
royalist propaganda, I argue that these texts were an important locus for wider cultural
and political discourse in the second half of the century. By exploring authorial strategy
in these texts in the context of Restoration society and politics, I demonstrate that
authors of cookery books actively participated in not only the formalization of the genre
but in a class- and gender-based debate about the health of the English national body.
Furthermore, in contextualizing and considering as a whole this specific corpus of major
cookery books, my study serves to broaden our understanding of the sites, literary or
otherwise, where such debates took place in the Restoration.

I. Historiography

Over the course of working on this project I have focused my research on four main
areas of relevant historical study in the early modern period: the relationship between
gender and public versus private spaces in Restoration society, the evolution of new
patterns of sociability vis-à-vis printed conduct manuals and codes of etiquette, print
culture and writings for and by women, and the history of cookery books. The
interrelatedness of shifting social and political boundaries between the public and
private, masculine and feminine realms is a central concern in this article. Michael
McKeon’s argument that different categories of knowledge and thought were being
increasingly articulated and differentiated throughout the early modern period has been
foundational to my thinking. In TheSecret History of Domesticity, McKeon shows how the tacit
division between public and private was being made more explicit following the
Restoration, especially in print but in other areas as well. [7] A spatial metaphor for this growing divide is the redesigning of interior
spaces in noble households throughout the 17th century. Specifically, the construction of
private apartments for sleeping and eating coincided with the decline of the great hall as
public space. This “separating out,” to use McKeon’s phrase, of the private from the
public is expressed in the tremendous emphasis placed on domesticity and domestic
practices during the Restoration.

The structure of the English household was one in which men and women performed
separate tasks but their authority intersected in often confusing ways. Wives were
understood to exercise sovereignty in specific areas such as childrearing and general
household management and economy (or oeconomy, as it was called). Within the space of the
kitchen, women performed or supervised food preparation and also possessed expertise in
the manufacture of medical remedies. Aristocratic women did not do everyday cooking but
oversaw genteel activities like preserving, conserving, candying, and other sugar-work.
They also manufactured household items like soaps and perfumes, which had pseudo-medicinal
purposes. The husband, however, maintained dominion over the household and his wife. Thus,
the Restoration household could be a complicated battleground, “a busy, chaotic,
threatening, playful, transgressive, and gory workplace,” as Wendy Wall puts it, where authority was shared and sometimes
contested between men and women. [8] Boundaries between men’s
work and women’s work continued to blur before and after the Restoration with respect to
public and private divisions. Trained male cooks such as May and Rabisha helped to
professionalize a household task typically performed by women servants. The manufacturing
of many items once done inside the home by women was taken over by waged male craftsmen.
At the same time that traditional women’s work was increasingly confined to final-stage
production within the home, women from both the upper and middling classes found
themselves in the position of participating within civil society as consumers. Starting in
the final decades of the 17th century, also, women entered the public sphere as published
authors.

Where and how men and women found themselves able to act autonomously had real
political import in Restoration England. By the 17th century, the longstanding analogy
between the household, family, and the state had acquired deep cultural resonance. This
“patriarchist theory of the state” held that household order was the foundation of
effective government. [9] The household was a little
commonwealth in which men were sovereign but women acted in meaningful ways as arbiters of
the family’s largesse and consumption habits. By the second half of the 18th century,
according to McKeon, it had become common to measure the achievements of a culture by
those of its women. [10] Household practices, and especially
those performed by women, therefore took on cultural and political tones, contradicting
other social norms that cast women as “the weaker vessel.” [11] Wall points out this inherent problem of analogizing family and state: “As
such, texts nominating the housewife as the guardian of a national and Christian
stewardship inevitably clashed with discourses that devalued the domestic realm as
trivial, effeminate, or infantilizing.” [12] In ways
previously unrecognized, Restoration-era cookery books are a site for these conflicting
discourses.

Another significant area of historiography with which this article engages is the
study of changing sociability patterns in early modern England. This article is concerned
not only with issues of gender but class as well, and, as such, changing social values and
structures in the Restoration come to bear on my study of cookery texts. In Hospitality in Early Modern England Felicity Heal argues
that while good housekeeping remained an important 17th-century virtue strongly linked
with England’s national identity, the period following the restoration of Charles II to
the monarchy was one of increasing anxiety over a perceived decline in traditional
hospitality which had always been administered through the great household. However, as
Lords abandoned their country estates for urban life in London and at court, a new form of
sociability emerged governed by the concept of “civility.” Polite society defined a
gentleman based on individual expressions of correct manners and dress, facilitating
social mobility and further contributing to the erosion of old-style hospitality. Heal
writes, “When the reputation was defined by the ability to use appropriate modes of
civility, or gain access to the correct London circles, the traditional household would no
longer so easily lie at its heart.” [13] While Heal locates
the collision between old-style hospitality and the new demands of polite society during
the Restoration in conduct books, I find it in cookery books.

Anna Bryson’s From Courtesy to Civility
makes a significant contribution to this area of scholarship. Although she
looks at sources written exclusively by and for men, Bryson shows how books on manners and
etiquette articulate new codes of politeness in early modern England. In response to
previous scholars who have seen the “ideological loading” of manners as peculiar to 18th
century commercial society, Bryson writes, “sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing on
social conduct gives ample evidence of ‘ideologically loaded’ conceptions of manners,
conceptions which were an integral part of larger visions of social and political
order.” [14] This contention drives this article, as does
Bryson’s idea that “the regulation of the body personal, as much as that of the body
politic, was the site of tension, conflict, and negotiation during the early modern
period.” [15] As Lawrence Klein points out, politeness as a
behavioural ideal was also closely tied to outward expressions of taste, meaning that
middling men and women could aspire to aristocratic modes of entertaining and sociability
within the home through the formal refinement of domestic interiors and aristocratic or
courtly cuisine. [16] Therefore the cookery books I examine,
in granting access to such cuisine, confront these new possibilities of social mobility.

In considering the negotiation between male and female authors of printed cookery
texts and the formal development of the cookery book itself, my article must contend with
the history of women writers and cookery books in the early modern period. Kim Hall, Laura
Knoppers, Suzanne Hull, Jayne Archer, and Madeline Bassnett have all written on the
politics of 17th century cookery books and collectively advance the argument that these
texts fashion English identity through the promotion of good domestic practices. In
particular, Knoppers’ emphasis on how categories of public and private apply to women in
cookery texts has contributed importantly to my thinking about this project. The works of
Elaine Hobby, Sara Pennell, and Catherine Field on early modern women writers and women’s
manuscript traditions have also informed my thinking about how women operate as subject
and object in printed texts. My discussion of Hannah Wolley’s authorial strategy in the
final section of this essay, however, somewhat challenges Hobby’s contention that women
writers retreated back into their increasingly private homes after the Restoration and
constructed their authority based on espousals of private virtue. This piece also owes due
credit to Pennell’s and Field’s work on women’s manuscript traditions and the gendering of
the recipe form, as few studies of cookery books from the Commonwealth and Restoration
periods consider this historical perspective.

As McKeon points out, the history and development of the cookery book throughout the
early modern period “provides a case study in the productivity of the gendered division of
both labour and knowledge.” [17] While the kitchen becomes a
contested space where male and female cooks compete as experts, so does the cookery book
itself as women authors begin to invade the male-dominated realm of print. The cookery
book was an emergent genre at the time of the Restoration. It developed over the course of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries out of a number of medieval writing traditions,
including household management guides, books of secrets, medical treatises, advice
literature, and women’s manuscript recipe collections. According to Sara Pennell, in the
early modern period cookery literature was an attractive and profitable genre for
publishers and booksellers. Between 1650 and 1750 approximately 106 new culinary texts and
169 subsequent editions of texts already in print were published in English in England,
Scotland, and Ireland. [18] It was an era when culinary
abilities were becoming increasingly marketable because of a growing demand for domestic
servants in urban centres.

As they became more popular, cookery books diverged from other types of books on
household management and increasingly marketed themselves toward women starting in the
late 16th century. According to Richard Appelbaum, “As they moved from manuscript culture
to print culture, cookbooks became more and more self-consciously constructed as verbal
performances designed for public release and prepared as acts of communication, an
‘author’ to a ‘reader’.” [19] They came more and more to
incorporate elements like tables of contents and indices and began to divide recipes into
categories based on types of dishes and modes of preparation. A general paradigmatic shift
also takes place in which food and medicine are separated into distinct categories. While
the cookery book began to develop certain conventions in the 17th century, it remained a
mixed, elastic form. With this in mind, I argue that the authors examined here actively
participated in the process of defining the cookery book as a genre.

English cookery books from the late 17th century are preoccupied with “courtly”
cuisine and emulating the consumption patterns and social practices of the élite. The
genre also begins to fissure along gendered lines during this period as we start to see
cookery books written by and for male professional chefs in contrast to those written by
women for female housekeepers. “Towards the end of the 17th century,” Abigail Dennis
writes, “the market for women’s cookbooks began to shift slightly, from housekeepers
themselves to middle- and upper-class mistresses who required manuals from which their
servants could work independently.” [20] Many of these books
contain rich prefatory materials that address a wide range of topics and often venture
into the realms of cultural criticism, politics, and philosophy. These types of prefatory
materials are central to this article, as it is primarily within this space that authorial
strategy is defined.

II. The Queens Closet Opened and The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth

The Queens Closet Opened (1655) and
The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth (1664)
belong to a distinct body of royalist cookery texts from the 1650s and early 1660s that,
as Madeline Bassnett and Laura Knoppers have pointed out, were used as polemical political
tools in the decades before and after Charles II’s restoration to emphasize aristocratic
and royalist social networks, promote courtly practices of the early Stuart era, and link
the wellbeing of the national household to the monarchy. [21]
The overt and covert political messages encoded in The
Queens Closet Opened and TheCourt & Kitchin of Elizabeth are well
established. [22]The Queens
Closet Opened was one of the most popular printed texts of the latter 17th
century. By 1684 it had gone through at least twelve editions. In contrast, The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth was published in 1664
and never reissued. Both were print commodities aimed at a middling, urban
market.

Both books were also attributed to women – The Queens
Closet Opened to the exiled queen Henrietta Maria and TheCourt & Kitchin of
Elizabeth to former protectoress Elizabeth Cromwell. Scholars today, however,
strongly doubt that either woman had any involvement in the texts and the real authors
have never been identified. The Queens Closet Opened
was written by W. M., possibly William Montagu, a close confidant and long-time
servant of Henrietta Maria. [23] W. M. writes that he was one
of the Queen’s “late servants” and had taken the recipes “from the true Copies of her
Majesties own Receipt Books,” which the queen had apparently amassed from a wide array of
aristocratic sources including royals, ladies, lords, countesses, and earls. [24] Henrietta Maria had been in exile in France for a decade when
the book was first published in England in 1655 and probably had no knowledge of its
existence. Laura Knoppers argues that royalist presses published The Queens Closet Opened in a response to previous attacks
in print against Henrietta Maria, especially The Kings
Cabinet Opened (1645), which had revealed scandalous correspondence between
Charles and Henrietta Maria and portrayed the queen as manipulative, domineering, and
foreign. The Queens Closet Opened counters this
image, displaying Henrietta Maria’s “unimpeachable virtues” as a housewife. It emphasizes
her Englishness and fitness as a queen by placing her within a network of previous English
queens, earls, countesses, doctors, and charitable ladies. [25] The book implies a strong connection between good household management and a
strong nation, making housewifery “into a branch of national government,” to use Jayne
Archer’s phrase. [26]

As a work of acerbic satire, The Court & Kitchin
of Elizabeth is an even more overtly political text. The anonymous author –
identified by one scholar as the printer Thomas Milbourne [27] – makes the case for the newly restored monarchy by haranguing the
Cromwellian court for its deplorable stinginess and uncouthness. The book depicts
Elizabeth as a low-class rube and plays off the plebeian tastes of the Cromwells, claiming
at one point “that onyons and water were the chief Court sauce.” [28] Whereas Henrietta Maria is portrayed as a consummate queen and housewife,
Elizabeth is depicted as an upstart who greedily profits from her new and ill-acquired
status by committing such coarse acts as selling items she has received as gifts. “She is
as stingy toward her husband’s table as she is toward the nation,” Knoppers writes.
Elizabeth was unwilling or unable to act hospitably in her role as protectoress. [29] The implication in The Court
& Kitchin of Elizabeth is that Elizabeth’s poor household management skills
and impropriety were detrimental to England.

Both texts justify exposing private feminine spaces to the public realm of print by
insisting that women’s virtues and vices within the household were matters of national
importance. As Jayne Archer writes, “Transposing household management onto national
politics, the receipt books published immediately following the Restoration could properly
claim to be ‘domestic’ in both senses of the word.” [30]
However, the male authors of The Queens Closet Opened
and The Court & Kitchin of
Elizabeth exhibit considerable self-consciousness over their invasion into the
private lives of their female subjects and betray a sense of anxiety as writers of
politically-toned recipe books aimed at women. The mixtures of political polemic and
recipe book, male authorship and female subjectivity, result in these two books’
instability as texts belonging to the cookery book genre.

At the opening of The Queens Closet Opened,
Henrietta Maria is figured as conferring a strong degree of authenticity and
legitimacy on the text – her portrait graces the frontispiece, implying her tacit
authorization of the recipes that follow. The title page states that the recipes contained
inside The Queens Closet Opened “were honoured
with her own practice, when she pleased to descend to these more private Recreations,”
indicating that the recipes therein passed her personal muster. [31] Like many other books of the 1660s, The Queens
Closet Opened is a text obsessed with the revelation of secrets. The “closet”
in the book’s title, Knoppers writes, “overtly allude[s] to the architectural spaces that
historians have linked with a new sense of privacy in this period, including the
construction of small rooms and the increasing appearance of the closet.” [32] Knoppers argues that the book itself functions as a type of
miniature closet or cabinet that the reader unlocks to find precious objects hidden
inside. But in revealing Henrietta Maria’s “secrets” – a contemporary term that was
frequently applied to medical remedies – W. M. must justify throwing open the closet doors
and granting privileged access to her interior, private space. He does so by claiming that
pirated copies of the recipes had already appeared in print abroad, and so: “had not the
lock been first pickt to have opened the Closet of my distressed Soveraigne Mistresse
without her royal assent,” W. M. would “sooner have parted with [his] dearest bloud, then
to have suffered them to be publick.” [33] Such rhetorical
genuflection suggests not only Henrietta Maria’s elevated royal status but also the
anxious ground on which W. M. treads as a male author thrusting a woman’s private interior
into the public domain of print.

The tensions between male author and female subject, public and private, are further
complicated by the fact that authorship never sits on solid ground in the text. W. M.
implies in his prefatory epistle that he is a mere amanuensis, stating, “there being few
or none of these receipts presented to her Majesty, which were not transcribed into her
book by my self, the Original papers being most of them preserved in my own hands.” [34] He is scribe, not author, while Henrietta Maria functions as a
curator of sorts. Authorship remains indeterminate, even (and one could say, especially)
given the long list in the beginning of the book of various royals, nobles, and doctors
who contributed the recipes written therein. Many cookery books from this period pirated
recipes from earlier texts, making the identification of a single “original” author
impossible. This idea is strengthened by the close relationship implied between the
printed book and Henrietta Maria’s manuscript recipe collection, which, if it existed,
would have almost certainly featured recipes handed down over generations with no
traceable origins. Furthermore, Jayne Archer argues that the formal features of The Queens Closet Opened are typical of the type of
manuscripts compiled by early modern women. Once the reader moves beyond W. M.’s preface,
she finds the recipes inside of an extremely ordinary quality. Written in a
straightforward, detached style, they reveal practically nothing about Henrietta Maria and
her personal tastes. [35] The result is a text in which any
sense of authorship slowly evaporates to reveal a troubling tension between what is
presented as a window into the private life of the Queen and her absenteeism from this
space she is supposed to occupy.

Similarly destabilizing issues of authorship can be found in The Court & Kitchen of Elizabeth. The author betrays a
similar anxiety as W. M. in throwing back the curtain that conceals a woman’s private
tastes and behaviours inside the home. He expresses this concern in the dedicatory
preface, desiring that the reader not think his book “an insultory, unmanlike Invective
and Triumph” over Elizabeth Cromwell and her family. The author defends the viciousness of
his attack by stating that Elizabeth was already a woman whose “Actions have infamed her
to the World.” [36] Basically, he argues that Elizabeth had
made herself vulnerable to such public invective by becoming a public figure in the first
place, and therefore has no claim to her former privacy. Like W. M., the author of
The Court & Kitchen of Elizabeth must go to
considerable lengths to legitimize his actions as a male writer engaged in the act of
making the private business of a woman public.

The author’s worry that the reader may think him “unmanlike” is particularly
interesting. It indicates not only his anxiety over attacking a woman in print but, as I
suggest, his anxiety over doing so within the genre of the recipe book. This uneasiness
over the relationship in The Court & Kitchin of
Elizabeth between public and private, male and female, contributes to the
formal indeterminacy of The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth
as cookery book. Laura Knoppers writes, “Indeed, the text itself strains the
genre of the cookery book with its multi-layered title page, learned citations,
eleven-page Preface ‘TO THE READER,’ long ‘Introduction,’ and even longer narrative
entitled ‘THE COURT and KITCHIN OF Mrs Elizabeth alias Joane Cromwell’.” [37] The genre of the cookery book is under strain, Knoppers
suggests, because both the length and vitriolic intensity of the political satire in the
preface overshadows any pretensions that the book makes to function as a practical cookery
guide. The attacks on Elizabeth’s extreme parsimony and poor housekeeping cast her recipes
in a deeply negative light and beg the question why a contemporary reader would want to
cook dishes conceived in such poor taste. But if The Court
& Kitchin of Elizabeth fails as cookery text, it does not exactly succeed
as satire either. “For all its lively detail and humour,” Knoppers writes, “The Court & Kitchin works against its own claim that
Elizabeth’s unsuitability is self-evident.” [38] Its generic
status is dubious on two levels, hinting further at the author’s own self-consciousness at
having transgressed gendered lines.

The Queens Closet Opened and The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth demonstrate that
cookery texts were a site where domestic practices intersected with national identity.
Both texts successfully participate in furthering the royalist political project,
participating in what we may call the politics of 17th-century cookery. However, the overt
politicization of the texts does not disguise – and, indeed, might actually account for –
their inconsistencies in both form and content. Neither author lays an authoritative claim
to the cookery book genre, leaving questions of authorship, form, and content open to
subsequent exploration and definition by other authors.

III. The Accomplisht Cook and The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected

At the dawn of Charles II’s restoration, two professional cooks published two of the
best- known English cookery texts of the 17th century: Robert May’s aforementioned
The Accomplisht Cook (1660) and William Rabisha’s
The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected (1661). Like
the two previous texts, May’s and Rabisha’s works are royalist in tone; both men worked as
master cooks for a number of important aristocratic households in England and abroad in
the decades before civil war. Both The Accomplisht Cook
and The Whole Body of Cookery
Dissected constitute more formal and extensive recipe collections than had
previously appeared in print in the English language. They were also among the first to
include illustrations, organize the recipes into categories, and include indices.
The Accomplisht Cook and The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected are also deeply
nostalgic texts that hearken to a previous era when lavish entertaining and extravagant
hospitality was the norm. Appearing in both are bills of fare for grand dinners that
feature dozens of dishes and use expensive ingredients, reflecting a strongly medieval
aesthetic.

Both authors write in elevated tones about revealing the “art of cookery” for the
benefit of professional male readers. May addresses his text to “Master Cooks, and to such
young Practitioners of the Art of Cookery,” while Rabisha writes that his book can only be
of use to cooks who already “understand the nature of the ingredients proposed for the
performance of any one thing.” [39] Both men express an
anxiety over revealing the secrets of the trade and anticipate the backlash such
disclosures might provoke. Rabisha writes:

I do not question but divers Brethren of my own Fraternity may open their mouths
against me, for publishing this Treatise, pretending that thereby it may teach every
Kitchen-wench, and such as never served their times, and so be prejudicial to the
Fraternity of Cooks.

The knowledge contained in Rabisha’s and May’s books is presented as the private,
protected province of this circumscribed male network of trade professionals who would
have bristled at the thought of a common “kitchen-wench” usurping their domain. Both
authors must therefore defend the publicizing of this secret knowledge, claiming, among
other reasons, their desires to advance the craft of cooking, honour and pay tribute to
the restored monarchy, educate young practitioners, improve the health of aristocratic
households, and promote good housekeeping across the nation.

The rhetorical hoops through which May and Rabisha must jump to compensate for
making possible the pilfering of their trade secrets by common female cooks – thereby
rendering the services of a higher-paid, élite male professional unnecessary – reveals an
important anxiety over the relationship between not only male and female cooks but over
the form and function of the recipe book itself. May and Rabisha lay strong claims to
authority as writers of cookery texts, denying the feminized literary form of the recipe
while at once transforming and co-opting the cookery book genre into their masculine
political projects. In both form and content, The
Accomplisht Cook and The Whole Body of Cookery
Dissected assert the elevated status of men as culinary professionals and
cookery book authors. In very similar ways, May and Rabisha make a case for the
indispensability of male cooks to the health of both the corporal body and the English
body politic while gendering their texts with masculine tropes.

Most of what we know about May’s and Rabisha’s lives come from their books. May was
born in 1588 in the parish of Wing, Buckinghamshire. A brief biographical sketch in
The Accomplishd Cook tells us that he trained as
a cook under his father, Edward Mays, “one of the ablest Cooks in his time,” before
completing a five-year apprenticeship in France followed by another apprenticeship in
London. [40] May then worked for a number of noble Catholic
families throughout the 1630s, 1640s, and Interregnum. The
Accomplisht Cook went through five editions by 1685, although May probably only
lived to see the publication of the improved second edition in 1665. [41] Rabisha’s career followed a similar trajectory, although many details of his
life are sketchy. He was born in 1625, possibly to a Yorkshire family. Rabisha writes in
the preface to The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected
that he trained “abroad in the late Kings Court” and then worked as a master
cook in a number of aristocratic households in England and abroad before the civil
war. [42] Rabisha died in 1661, the same year that the first
edition of The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected
was published, but his book went through at least four subsequent editions by
1675.

Where the authors of The Queens Closet Opened
and The Court & Kitchin of
Elizabeth express a sense of anxiety over writing within the confines of the
cookery book genre, May and Rabisha actively assimilate more masculine literary tropes
into their texts. Both use elevated language, referring to the “art” of cookery as
belonging within the “arts and sciences” rather than the realm of women’s domestic work.
Rabisha compares his efforts in The Whole Body of Cookery
Dissected to the work of the “Astronomer, Mathematician, Navigator, Physician,
Chirurgion, Farryer,” and many other “ingenious men of all Arts and Sciences” who gifted
their knowledge to posterity through print. A brief dedication in The Accomplisht Cook book compares May to “Famous
Cleaveland, or renowned Ben,” aligning May with contemporary writers in high public
standing. [43] The numerous introductions to the texts are
punctuated with classical and biblical allusions. The biographical sketch of May’s life,
for instance, sets up an extended analogy between contemporary England and the Roman
Republic, citing the importance of hospitality in both contexts and referring numerous
times to Plutarch, Cicero, and Pompey. All of these literary conventions suggest that both
May and Rabisha were attempting to de-feminize not only the practice of cooking but also
the cookery book itself, bringing it into a male-dominated literary domain where they
could more easily assert their rights as authors.

Both men carve out space for women and traditional female knowledge forms in their
texts, but without relinquishing their authority as authors and cooks. While May dedicates
his work solely to prominent male aristocrats, Rabisha dedicates his to important female
patrons. The vast majority of the recipes in both volumes instruct the cooking of flesh,
suggesting a division of kitchen labour in which men prepared meats while women engaged in
more delicate processes such as candying and preserving. However, May’s text does feature
a final section on medicinal remedies – traditionally an area of women’s expertise – but
he justifies its inclusion by affirming his desire to promote good bodily health. He makes
serious claims to complete authority in this area, boasting that only The Queens Closet Opened, “which was so enricht with Receipts presented to her Majesty … ever contained so many profitable Experiences as in this Volume.” [44] Only the queen herself, then, can boast knowledge exceeding
May’s. He maintains that his book is still accessible to women of a middling sort who
oversee the running of a more modest household, for he still hopes that “they may give,
though upon a sudden Treatment, to their Kindred, Friends, Allies and Acquaintance, a
handsome and relishing entertainment in all seasons of the year.” Rabisha and May thus
acknowledge women in their roles as household managers and practitioners of good
hospitality (thereby also expanding their potential readership and profits), but neither
concedes any ground to female authority over matters of cooking or recipe authorship.

Nor does either author make any great effort to sublimate their strong royalist
leanings in their books. Each nostalgically remembers a golden age of magnificent
hospitality before civil war. May wistfully recalls “those Golden Days of Peace and
Hospitality” from an earlier Stuart era when “those Triumphs and magnificent Trophies of
Cookery” adorned the tables of England’s élite. [45] May and
Rabisha are openly scornful of the austerity of the Interregnum period and celebrate the
Restoration as the return of magnificent hospitality and grand feasting. “Hospitality
which was once a Relique of the Gentry, and a known Cognizance to all ancient Houses, hath
lost her Title through the unhappy and Cruel Disturbances of these Times,” May
writes. [46] Rabisha praises his noble patronesses as
“upholders and nourishers of all ingenuous Arts and Sciences, and in particular, that of
the said Mysterie of Cookery” who practiced hospitality “even in those late covetous
destructive times under the Cloak of Frugality.” [47] He then
compares the return of the king and other formerly-exiled families to “the Sun in the
Firmament, which keeps not his light and heat for himself, but in his Gradual revolution,
freely bestows himself to the giving of life, freeing and cloathing the whole Universe.”
In particular, though, it is the “food and rayment, they pay for, by which all men live,”
that keeps the nation revolving “like a great Wheel.” [48]
Feeding others as an act of hospitality thus ensures England’s continued security and
prosperity. Just as the authors of The Queens Closet Opened
and The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth
equate proper housekeeping with a well-ordered nation, so May and Rabisha
connect hospitality and feasting among the nobility to the wellbeing of England.

If, as May and Rabisha suggest, England’s noble families ought to re-establish
magnificent hospitality for the good of the nation, they would need a professional cook to
do it. Or, more accurately, they would require a small army of professionals, as one can
hardly imagine a single cook preparing the kind of feasts described in the pages of May’s
and Rabisha’s books. In this sense, the authors make a strong case for the
indispensability of their “fraternity” of professionals. And just as male cooks contribute
to national wellbeing through the practice of their art, May and Rabisha see themselves as
performing a similar service as authors of informative and instructive cookery books. A
prefatory verse poem “On the Unparalell’s Piece of Mr. May His Cookery” in The Accomplisht Cook glorifies the text as a work of
national importance:

The poem figures May as England’s master cook (calling him “Native May”) and characterizes him as the architect of national
feasts. In re-introducing England to the methods and manner of courtly feasting, then,
May’s text sees itself as a tool of nation building.

The Accomplisht Cook and The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected insist upon the vital
nature of the male cook in English society. At the same time, May and Rabisha assert their
own authority as authors of the recipe book genre with important political agendas.
Unfortunately for May and Rabisha, however, their books fail to anticipate the ways that
Restoration society was leaving behind older social codes built around hospitality and
adopting a new form of sociability governed by the more individualized concept of
civility. In championing out-dated notions of hospitality and the need for such expensive,
labour-intensive dishes, The Accomplisht Cook and
The Whole Art of Cookery Dissected ignore the
more modest capabilities of middling housewives who nonetheless desired means of
participating in polite, commercial society. We turn next to Hannah Wolley, whose cookery
books proved extraordinarily popular in the decade or so after May and Rabisha published
their books. Herself a woman of middling status, Wolley gave her middling readers a
practical means of participating the national project of good housekeeping.

IV. Hannah Wolley’s The Queen-Like Closet

Hannah Wolley (also written Woolley or Wooley) is often celebrated as England’s
first female professional writer, preceding Aphra Behn by a decade. [50] Beginning with The Ladies Directory
in 1661, she wrote and published eight different cookery books before
1675. In addition to giving medical remedies and
alimentary recipes, Wolley’s books also dispense advice on how to run a proper household.
Her most popular book was The Queen-Like Closet,
first published in 1670. It went through at least four subsequent printings and
sold for two shillings. Wolley’s books are directed at middling female readers and provide
non-aristocratic women with the knowledge and know-how to emulate the élite domestic
practices of England’s great houses. According to Elaine Hobby, the principal concern of
Wolley’s works is to “educate her upwardly-aspirant woman reader in how to present
herself, and her home, as richer and more fashionable than they really are.” This
aspirational quality of her books suggests an analogy between Wolley and the 21st-century
Martha Stewart. [51]

Born in 1622, Wolley worked in an aristocratic household between the ages of 17 and
24 at a time when it was common for young women to work as domestic servants before
marriage. In 1646 she married Jeremy Wolley, master of the Newport Free Grammar School in
Essex. Mrs. Wolley cared for the boarders at her husband’s school and assisted him in
running its operations. In 1653 the couple moved to Hackney, a village north of London,
where together they ran another school until Mr. Wolley’s death in 1661. That same year
she published her first book, The Ladies Directory.
By 1666 Wolley had moved to Westminster and was remarried to a gentleman
widower named Francis Chaloner. By the time she published The Queen-Like Closet in 1670, Wolley had been widowed a second time and was
living in London. In her lifetime she gave birth to four sons and two daughters. Her
precise death date is unknown but it is usually placed around 1675 when she ceased
publication of new work. Wolley’s other important cookery texts include The Cooks Guide (1664) and The Accomplisht Ladies Delight (1675).

In an interesting parallel to W. M.’s unauthorized work as Henrietta Maria’s
amanuensis in The Queens Closet Opened, a male
hack writer hired by the bookseller Dorman Newman published a work under Wolley’s name
entitled The Gentlewoman’s Companion without her
permission in 1673. The book included a lengthy biographical section on Wolley’s life in
which the writer makes a bold case for improving women’s educations and defends a woman’s
right to marry for love. Such statements have led scholars in the 20th century to seize
upon The Gentlewoman’s Companion as an example of
a proto-feminist work. [52] However, in A supplement to The queen-like closet (1674), Wolley
repudiates the hack writer’s work, calling it “scandalous, ridiculous, and
impertinent.” [53] Elaine Hobby argues that the use of
Wolley’s name on the cover of The Gentlewoman’s
Companion is strong evidence that her works were seen as particularly saleable
commodities. [54]

While she can’t be called a proto-feminist exactly, Wolley often takes a stance on
moral and political issues in her works. In The Queen-like
Closet, she frequently intersperses the recipes with commentary on matters of
social or political significance, moving at times unexpectedly back and forth between
practical and intellectual subjects. As a result, Elaine Hobby writes, “readers find
themselves encountering observations about gender division, or about poverty, or about the
meanings of language, or about the lives of women and of the author in particular, in
between or in the midst of instructions about the proper running of home and
family.” [55] I argue that this is part of Wolley’s authorial
strategy. In developing a more flexible type of cookery text, she successfully constructs
her own authority as author, housewife, and Englishwoman. Though aware that as a female
writer she trespasses male-dominating territory, Wolley ably exploits the cookery book
form to her own ends as an author and authority on feminine subjects. The Queen-like Closet displays her authoritative knowledge
of cookery and housekeeping, synthesizing and integrating into a “compleat” whole a number
of fluctuating dichotomies such as public and private, male and female, ignorant and
informed, middling and aristocratic.

The reference to Henrietta Maria’s The Queens Closet
Opened in the title of The Queen-Like Closet
suggests that Wolley was attempting to attract a readership easily wooed by the
promise of secret knowledge. Her strategy appears successful, as The Queen-Like Closet became Wolley’s best-selling work.
She displays no anxiety over revealing her secrets, only confidence: “I do assure you it
is worthy of the Title it bears, for the very precious things you will find in it,” she
writes of the book. [56] While Wolley presents The Queen-like Closet as a cabinet filled with precious
secrets, in it she greatly expands upon her earlier works, reprinting old recipes and
adding new materials like bills of fare and a section on household management and service.
At over 300 pages, it is also longer and more encyclopaedic than either May’s or Rabisha’s
books. Like a cabinet of individual drawers, however, The
Queen-like Closet organizes and compartmentalizes the knowledge it contains
into discrete sections, giving the text the same intimate closet-like quality that
Knoppers ascribes to The Queens Closet Opened.
The doors open to reveal not a cramped interior but a window into a wide realm
of culinary and domestic knowledge.

Wolley’s book is synthetic in that it combines within a unified whole a wide variety
of culinary knowledge, breaking it down into digestible parts. While the first section of
the book contains the type of recipes typically produced by women, such as perfumes,
healthful waters, and preserves, the second section addresses “all manner of cookery, for
Fish, Flesh & Pastry.” [57] Wolley thus stakes a strong
claim to expertise in all areas of cookery, feminine or otherwise. Within the individual
sections, though, she organizes the recipes according to no discernible pattern or
principle. Medicinal remedies are mixed in with procedures for pickling, preserving,
candying, as well as recipes for cakes, creams, puddings, and possets. Sweet sometimes
mingles with savoury. There is also a noticeable mixture of styles in the inclusion of
recipes for “Spanish Candy,” “French Bread,” and “Italian Bisket.” Furthermore, many
recipes range in level of difficulty from extremely simple, like Wolley’s “To make Clove or Cinamon Sugar” (consisting of a single
sentence instructing the reader to “put sugar in a Box, and lay Spices among it, and close
up the Box fast, and in a short time it will smell and tast very well”), to excessively
long and complicated. [58] Directions for how “To make a Rock in Sweet-Meats,” for instance, take up
nearly five pages, require several prior preparations, and seem every bit as elaborate as
May’s courtly entremets. [59] Wolley’s book thus integrates and synthesizes a wide array of culinary types
and styles to help her reader achieve what she calls a “Compleat Table.”

Within the text, Wolley paints non-culinary subjects such as class and gender with
the same amalgamating brushstrokes, skilfully blending together a number of competing
social dichotomies in the Restoration period. She notes the decreasing rigidity of
Restoration society, writing that a maid ought to find satisfaction in her work, for “she
will make her self happy also, for by her Industry she may come one day to be Mistress
over others.” [60] One could imagine both maids and
mistresses alike being pleased with this counsel. Wolley’s understanding of good English
hospitality is also informed by her awareness of the possibilities of both downward and
upward social mobility. She tells housewives, “If any poor Body comes to ask an Alms, do
not shut the door against them rudely, but be modest and Civil to them … and think with
your selves, that though you are now full fed … yet you know not what may be your
condition another day.” [61] Although Wolley acknowledges
that English society has grown increasingly fluid, she still recognizes the importance of
conspicuous symbols of social rank. Indeed, her expert status as a writer of cookery books
rests on her ability to prescribe methods of service and codes of hospitality appropriate
to a household’s relative social standing. For example, she gives “A Bill of Fare for
Gentlemens Houses of Lesser Quality,” from which she says “you may also know how to order
any Family beneath another, which is very requisite.” [62]
Her text achieves a balance between encouraging middling readers to aspire to higher
social rank while affirming and validating the existing social hierarchy.

Wolley’s views on gender exhibit a similar flexibility. Unlike May and Rabisha, she
makes no attempt to assign a gender to the English cook, writing: “The Cook, whether Man
or Woman, ought to be very well skilled in all manner of things both Fish and Flesh, also
good at Pastry business, seasoning of all things, and knowing all kinds of Sauces.” [63] A cook’s skill and experience are more important than his or
her gender, she argues, perhaps implying by extension that the same is true of the cookery
book author. As a mixed form combining male and female knowledge types as well as various
social viewpoints, Wolley’s text successfully dodges many of the rhetorical traps that
trip up May’s and Rabisha’s works. Consequently, The
Queen-like Closet exhibits fewer internal tensions and problems of authorship
than the works previously considered here. Wolley herself comes to embody the synthesis
that her text performs, as she moves more or less unproblematically in and out of public
and private spaces, the print and domestic realms.

Wolley concludes her text with a statement about her ultimate aims as an author: “I
have taken this pains to impart these things for the general good of my Country,” she
writes. [64] Wolley clearly sees herself as performing a
service not only to Ladies and housewives, but to England as well. In dedicating her book
to “all Ladies, Gentlewomen, and to all other of the Female Sex who do delight in, or be
desirous of good Accomplishments,” Wolley makes good housekeeping into a broad national
project in which all women could participate. Whereas May and Rabisha tried to keep such
activity restricted to the domain of the male professional, Wolley gives middling
Englishwomen the requisite tools to advance the cause of nation building through
advocating correct domestic practices.

In her discussion of women’s manuscript recipe collections, Sara Pennell points to a
general “diversification of domestic literature out from the socially circumscribed
precious ‘closet open’d’ genre of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,”
also noting an increasing inclusivity with which women were identified in these manuscript
collections as practitioners of the genteel domestic arts. As Pennell writes, by the 18th
century, “The ‘compleat housewife’ emerged not only as a household ideal, but as a
national exemplar.” [65] I argue that Wolley’s writings also
follow this shift, and that as a commercially successful author she communicates this
“national exemplar” of the ideal English housewife to a wider reading public. For Wolley,
writing and publishing a cookery book is itself an act of hospitality. “Courteous Reader,”
she writes in one of her many asides, “I have given you, as I think, a very fill Direction
for all kinds of Food, both for Nourishment and Pleasure,” [66] suggesting perhaps a sense that her books in a way “nourish” the reader with
culinary knowledge. Wolley feeds the reader figuratively, and in teaching practicable
recipes, almost literally. In this way, her book promotes the national wellbeing while
performing it simultaneously.

V. Conclusion

Long before the social and political trauma of civil war, regicide, and
non-monarchical government, English men and women expressed deep concern over the
political consequences of their domestic practices. The belief in the close association
between household order and effective government formed the bedrock of the early modern
social order. [67] As Wendy Wall writes, “Scholars agree that
the link between household and commonwealth was radically reconfigured in the mid-17th
century in the wake of the Civil War.” [68] Upon the
restoration of Charles II to the throne, concern over the health of the English household
– and, by extension, the nation – intensified as English society underwent a restructuring
of social and political attitudes. New boundaries were erected to delineate expanding
categories of social thought while older ones were redrawn. From this context of disorder
and reorder emerges the genre of the cookery book.

Like other cultural productions of the Restoration era, the texts I consider above
articulate strong views about proper modes of behaviour in a period of fluctuating
political and social mores. Restoration-era cookery books argue that the re-strengthening
of the nation starts inside the household. This article contends that authors of cookery
books from 1655 to 1670 were engaged in a debate about which members of English society –
male or female, middling or aristocratic – could participate in the national politics of
cookery and household management and in what kind of setting: public or private. In doing
so, they shaped their authority on domestic practices and as authors of a genre that was
finding its definitive form in these years. Both W. M. and the author of The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth clearly articulate the
idea that private habits and tastes have serious bearing on public reputation and
nationhood. However, as unauthorized male authors uneasily drawing back the curtains on
female interiors, W. M. and the author of The Court &
Kitchin of Elizabeth fail to construct authoritative texts and therefore render
null the information contained inside their volumes. May and Rabisha, alternately,
gendered both the cook and the cookery book author as strictly male, making the project of
English nation building a predominantly male one as well as one reserved for the upper
classes. However, their texts fail to recognize the ways that English society had
transformed since before civil war as avenues for entering polite society continued to
expand. Finally, Wolley formally digests previous cookery books to create a synthetic,
authoritative text that positions women of all classes – with Wolley herself at the fore –
as collective actors in the strengthening of the national household.

Previous scholars have looked at ways that these texts articulate ideas about
gender, politics and domesticity. However, none has considered them together as a related
body of work engaged in a process of negotiation within the context the Restoration social
and political orders. Ultimately, these texts enrich our understanding of the realigning
categories of public and private life in the Restoration, and therefore contribute to our
understanding of the Restoration itself as a period of transformation. As intersections of
domestic practice and national identity, cookery books are seen here as engaging in a wide
range of social and political debates and should not be dismissed as texts pertaining
exclusively to domestic matters. In looking to cookery books for clues about how ordinary
people might have adopted and assimilated new behaviours and tastes into their own lives,
this study dovetails with other scholarly work on the socio-political nature of cookery
books in later centuries or in other national contexts.

[16]For more on the relationship between domestic consumption and polite society in the
late seventeenth century, see Lawrence Klein, “Politeness and the Interpretation of the
British Eighteenth Century,” The Historical Journal
45, no. 4 (2002): 882-887.

[35]The reader learns considerably more about Henrietta Maria’s culinary tastes from the
recipe book of Sir Kenelm Digby, former Chancellor to the Queen, whose posthumous
The Closet Of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt.
Opened (London, 1669) includes recipes such as “the Queen’s Barley Cream” and
“Hydromel as I made it weak for the Queen Mother.”

Note biographique

Claire Saffitz graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 2009 with a BA in American history and literature. She earned a certificate in French cuisine at the Ferrandi French School of Culinary Arts in Paris, France in 2012. In 2013 she received her MA from McGill University in history, with a focus on French culinary history. Saffitz works as a freelancer in New York City.